No, not that VersionTracker…

As regular readers might recall, my last versions of Zingg! feature an improved update query that allows me to tabulate which Mac OS X version the client is running. Preliminary results show that roughly 3 out of 4 Zingg! users are running Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther). Nearly all Panther users are running 10.3.2… but curiously, about 15% of the Jaguar users have not yet updated to 10.2.8, the last Jaguar release. These figures may be distorted by the fact that most users who check regularly for new versions will of course also upgrade to the latest Mac OS X as soon as possible.

There are no figures for 10.1.x users, as there’s no way to distinguish them from users of XRay, which doesn’t yet have the new version-tracking code. In any event, other surveys have found that they number under 10% (some say 5%) of active Mac OS X users. I don’t plan to support 10.1.x for any new version of my products, and indeed no longer have a Mac that runs it available for testing.

Starting with Jaguar, Mac OS X has facilities for weak-linking system calls and for easily checking if certain calls are available or not. This makes writing software that runs on both older and newer systems much easier. Hopefully Panther adoption rates will be such that I’ll soon be able to release Panther-only software.